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Vibe writing: borrowing the developers' word to clear up the AI & writing debate

Vibe coding has existed in developer culture since February 2025. Imported into literature, it draws a clear line where the AI & writing debate keeps going in circles — and names the real red line.

12 days ago9 min read

"There's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists."
— Andrej Karpathy, X, February 2, 2025

In a matter of months, vibe coding has settled into developer vocabulary. Andrej Karpathy — one of OpenAI's co-founders (the company behind ChatGPT) — posted it on X one February evening in 2025 as a half-amused observation, and it spread at a rare clip for a technical term. Merriam-Webster picked it up the following March as a "slang & trending" expression. Collins made it its Word of the Year for 2025. Among working developers, the term now describes a specific posture: prompting an intent in plain language, accepting whatever the model generates, running it, repeating — without reading the underlying logic, without understanding it, sometimes without even opening the file.

The word hasn't yet crossed into literature. It should. Because it pins down something the current debate between authors and AI keeps failing to articulate.

The debate keeps going in circles

When a novelist mentions using ChatGPT, two camps line up immediately. The purist camp ("no serious writer touches that stuff") and the open camp ("it's just one more tool, like the dictionary, like Grammarly"). The two camps talk past each other. The first conflates touches with substitutes for. The second conflates occasional tool with primary engine.

The missing word is vibe writing.

Borrowing the term from the developer ecosystem isn't a branding move. It's a precise operation: vibe coding already carries a connotation among serious developers. Nobody says "I'm a vibe coder" in a standup without a touch of irony. It has become shorthand for the beginner who prompts Cursor (an AI-powered code editor) without reading the result, ships the feature to production, and has no real idea what their own app does when a user clicks. The word carries an implicit judgment. It separates pro from amateur without needing to explain why. That's exactly what the literary debate needs.

The spectrum — four levels of authorial involvement

Once the word is on the table, it forces a sketch of what it isn't. The spectrum lays itself out in four levels.

1. Bare writing. Zero AI. The author types, edits, rereads, alone. This is the stance claimed by a large share of "pure" literary writers, and it remains perfectly defensible. No judgment to pass — it's a discipline of the mind, not a backwardness.

2. Augmented writing. AI enters the loop as a living dictionary, a thinking partner, a structural mirror. The author asks it for a synonym, a fact-check, an opinion on a chapter's pacing. They write every sentence themselves. The generated text never makes it into the manuscript. It's the equivalent of a novelist calling a doctor friend to verify a pharmacology detail: the AI provides information, not prose.

3. Co-writing. The author keeps direction — intent, voice, narrative arc — but accepts that the AI proposes drafts, reformulations, scene variants. They rewrite extensively on top. Every sentence passes through their own pen. The final text is an acknowledged blend, but the voice stays theirs because they rework it on each pass. It's demanding. Paradoxically, it requires more stylistic discrimination than bare writing, because you have to actively reject the translated Anglo-Saxon average that the model produces by default.

4. Vibe writing. The author prompts an intent — "write me a chapter where Mary discovers her father lied to her, melancholy tone, 1,500 words." They accept the text as is or almost. They move to the next prompt. They don't rewrite. Their work becomes curatorial: choose, accept, reject, ask again. The final manuscript is 80 to 90 % composed of unedited generated prose. It's the exact analogue of the vibe coder who ships an app without reading their code.

The red line: who owns the voice?

The trick question in the current debate is "do you use AI, yes or no?". That's the wrong question. The right one, the one that actually cuts, is: who owns the voice of the final text?

The voice belongs to whoever rewrites. As long as the author rewrites each sentence, their stylistic signature survives. Their tics, their lifts, their assumed missteps, their rhythm — all of it persists, even when 60 % of the initial draft came from a model. Conversely, the moment they accept the raw text without running it through their own filter, the voice fades. Not dramatically. By progressive bleaching. The prose becomes competent. Readable. Angle-free. That's a model's signature, not an author's.

Developers have known this line for two years. A senior dev who talks to Claude (Anthropic's assistant) all day stays senior — they reject 80 % of the suggestions, refactor, push back. A beginner vibe coder produces working code they don't understand, which breaks at the first edge case. Same in writing. Why invent a brand new debate when the previous one has already settled it?

The purist's counter-argument and its weakness

The classic purist objection runs: "yeah but writing is different. Code is a utility tool; the novel is an artistic act." The argument is seductive. It's wrong for two reasons.

First, code is also an act of mind. Ask any developer above a certain level whether solving a distributed-architecture problem is less creative than writing a crime-novel dialogue. You'll get the answer. The difference isn't in nature — it's in the public visibility of the result. A novel is read; a distributed system is endured.

Second, and more importantly: the argument collapses the moment you look at the history of writing tools. The word processor didn't kill literature. Grammarly didn't kill style. Copy editors didn't kill the author. Each generation has greeted its tool with the same panic, and each time, serious writers kept writing books worth reading, simply with one more tool in the kit.

AI is different because it doesn't merely help — it can, theoretically, replace. True. But only at level 4 of the spectrum. At levels 2 and 3, it remains exactly what previous tools were: an instrument. Conflating the levels is putting the printed book on trial because Gutenberg also enabled the industrial mass production of mediocre pamphlets.

A small irony of the trade

A note in passing. Most publishers who publicly denounce AI manuscripts — rightly — are also busy licensing their own backlists to AI companies for known sums. HarperCollins, one of the American Big Five, signed an agreement with Microsoft in late 2024 reportedly around $5,000 per non-fiction title, for model training. The author who signs the "no AI books, ever" petition is asking a publisher that already sells its books to OpenAI or Microsoft to hold a moral line that same publisher isn't holding on its own ledger.

That's not a reason to skip signing the petition. It's a reason to look at the debate with a little distance. Both camps have internal contradictions. Vibe writing at least clarifies what we're actually arguing about, instead of waving grand principles.

What it changes, concretely

Reframing the debate around this spectrum changes three things for an author wondering where they stand.

First: you can use AI without feeling guilty, as long as you stay the master craftsman. That phrase matters. A developer who codes with Claude stays a master craftsman — they decide at every line. A writer who prompts ChatGPT to rephrase a paragraph and then rewrites it keeps the same position. The AI proposes; sometimes, almost randomly and without intention, it produces a phrasing that unblocks a real idea — but it's the author who decides what enters the text. That stance isn't a concession. It's the normal position of a craftsperson facing any tool.

Second: there is a red line, and it has a name. If you ask a model to write 280 pages from a prompt and you sign the cover, you're vibe writing. You aren't the author of the book. You're the buyer of a generation service. You can absolutely own that as a genre — it is one, after all, or at least a format of production — but own it openly, don't disguise it.

Third: the tool market sorts itself. Some online writing apps openly embrace the vibe-writing posture — Sudowrite, Novarrium and Squibler ship "generate me a chapter" modes that do exactly that. Others choose the opposite stance: discreet AI, switchable off, triggered only on demand and never feeding outside models with authors' texts. That's the path of WriteControl, Extypis, Scribbook on one side, and Dabble or Novlr on the other. The distinction isn't binary pro/anti AI. It's about which level of the spectrum the tool targets and favors.

A writer's job is to pick the tool that serves their practice at the level they want to sit on — not to pick between AI and nothing.

The word, finally

Importing vibe writing into literary vocabulary is as much a tactical move as an analytical one. Tactical because the word carries an implicit judgment the tech community has already installed — we don't have to defend it, it arrives pre-loaded. Analytical because it forces us to draw the levels, name the spectrum, stop debating in blocks.

The author who uses spellcheck isn't a vibe writer.
The author who asks a model to rephrase a paragraph and then rewrites it by hand isn't a vibe writer.
The author who prompts a whole chapter and accepts it without reworking it is a vibe writer.

Once that line is drawn, the AI-and-writing debate finally becomes productive. No more "machine versus human" abstractions. We know who's talking about what. We know what level we're at. We can judge the work, not the posture.

That's all you can really ask of a word.

Sources

HU

Hubert Giorgi

Author

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